I haggle movie prices at Best Buy all the time. They usually give me a 20% discount. Mostly they are just matching internet prices for stuff like Naruto, but still I argue and they give me the discount.
I own a grain silo. The grain silo was expensive to build, but once built holds an infinite amount of grain. It does have a small cost to maintain.
Now I can sell the grain for $60 a bag. People really like my grain. But I have a near infinite supply and not everyone can afford the $60 bag. So I have people lined up around 6 Billion of them who would gladly buy a bag for $1. There are also people who couldn't even afford the dollar. Am I in the right to only sell my infinite supply of grain to people willing to pay $60?
Now a hyperbole: There are people starving. Withholding grain from people just because you want to make more money may be legal, but it doesn't make it right.
You're right about the dangerous pesticides.
You're wrong about dangerous dog breads.
As long as they obey leash laws the bread shouldn't matter. If you trespass into their fenced yard, and are bitten, that is your fault.
I was with you till you started to ramble about the "death of conservative economics". What you fail to realize is that we don't live in a post-scarcity world. We live in a dual economy. We have parts of the economy that are post-scarcity and parts that are very scarce. Energy, technology, bits, are all post-scarcity. Water, food, land, Megan Fox are all scarce resources. The problem is that people are so used to the scarce economy that they don't know how to deal with the new post-scarce resources. They treat the post-scarce resources just like the scarce one and try to limit the distribution of those resources. To say that conservative economics is dead is a gross overstatement.
Why are we beaming power via laser when we are riding the lift up a conductive cable? Can't the cable itself transmit the electricity needed to power the elevator?
This is what I mean! The touch screen isn't obvious and a lot of work goes into developing the first touch screen. However once a touch screen is developed all the different ways to use it become obvious. Someone can then patent a particular use of a touch screen barring other people from using it in that manner, which is total crap. The original invention required work to create, however it opens the door to millions of obvious uses once the original device has been created. These derivatives should not be patentable.
We already buy and sell votes. I don't think it would really matter if you could buy or sell a vote. If the issues matter in an election they couldn't pay you enough to change your vote. If the issues don't matter then why not sell your vote. You couldn't have paid me enough money to vote for Barack Obama (I voted Ron Paul - McCain is as bad or worse). As for city elections for something like school board, I'd so sell my vote because it really doesn't matter to me. But for any office where they have the option to tax or make something illegal you couldn't buy my vote (well in a way you do by your policies...) The entire system is based on buying and selling votes. You think that Barack's promises of health care for all weren't vote buying? Or not taxing anyone making less than $250,000 a year. That was so vote buying. A direct check from the candidate would be a much more efficient method.
The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.
Why is it that a statistically insignificant number of people with a good sob story can change legislative policy?
Do we really need another law for that? I'm sorry, but I grew up at a time before seat belts when we used to put sleeping bags in the back of cars during long car trips and go to sleep in the back while mom and dad drove us to our destination. If you were to do that now the parents would be hauled off to jail for negligence.
I hate this one bad apple mentality. There are 310 million people and counting in the US; one persons daughter gets killed by a repeat offender and goes on a moral crusade and we now have 3 strike laws. You get busted for pot 3 times and you're in jail for 30 years. What kind of messed up society do we live in?
I'm sorry that you can see idiots using their cell phones so they become a scapegoat for all bad drivers. No matter what solution they come up with there will always be automobile accidents. They are part of life. It really sucks that a few thousand people can ruin it for millions of us.
I guess its not so obvious, I pictured it more like a Nintendo DS with dual screens in a binder like setting. Whats the point of having two screens on the same page.... Two screens that open like a book, now that is an obvious use of multiple screens. Maybe I should patent it quick...
You added one to many albums. Metallica (The Black Album), 1991 was the sell-out album that made them copyright whores. Before the black album they were tape sharing band like the Grateful Dead, after the black album they sold-out to the industry.
Just because I think a Federal Education system is bad doesn't mean I don't think education should be provided for the masses. I just don't think it is something that should be provided by the Federal Government. There are other ways to provide education.
And way to fall victim to the indoctrination machine and believing that there are only two groups of political views: the left and the right. I'm sorry but there is a lot of stuff in the middle. The far right is messed up with their trying to shove religion down everyones throat and the far left is messed up trying to protect everyone from themselves.
By fixed money supply I was thinking one based on the Census. X number of dollars per person are printed annually, no more no less. Therefore the money supply is fixed to the population, not to the whims of the FED. The FED reserver rate would be fixed at something like 6-10%, high enough to discourage people from borrowing from the FED, but low enough that if you couldn't get a loan someplace else you had a "lender of last resort".
I'm not under the impression that computers are the answer to everything, you still need to know what you are doing. The computer is only as good as those programming it.
Police are not babysitters. They are not there to protect us from ourselves. They are there to defend property and citizens from each other. For those reasons they are important.
If thugs go after some ethnic group that isn't yours you should not have to pay for their protection.
What does ethnicity have to do with anything? They are people too and would get the same protections of property and self as any other ethnicity.
If some indigent gets sick or insured you shouldn't have to pay for their care. Let them die if they don't have the money.
In a perfect and ideal world, no this would never happen. However ( and this is the point that everyone in the healthcare debate seems to miss ) It costs money to provide healthcare. In some cases lots of money. What is the value of human life? If a procedure is going to cost 100 million dollars to save 1 person is it still worth it because life is valuable? Death is inevitable, we are all going to die. It is just a matter of time. In some cases it is not worth it, even for a family member to pay the costs of healthcare. It is sometimes better to let your own child die then pay for a miracle. The idea that the government should pay whatever costs are necessary at the taxpayers expense is impractical. It doesn't mean we as a society shouldn't strive to provide care for all, it just means you must take into account the real costs in the real world and ask if it is worth it. Healthcare has costs it cannot and never will be free. Also, death is natural and it is not inhumane to let people die - no one lives forever.
On Education: For starters a public education system is the tenth plank of the communist manifesto. Second the public education system is used as an indoctrination tool and inhibits free thought, in the public education system you are punished for being a non-conformist. Then there is the cost of public education, once again people aren't practical about how to pay for it. Even if the first two points didn't matter the public education system is horribly underfunded to even meet its stated goals. Here are two more reasons why some people don't want to support public education: 1. They never used it (private or home schooled). 2. It holds back the bright students in order to cater to the failing ones.
I don't think anyone is for no-government. However we managed just fine for hundreds of years with less government. I'm all for government, just less of it. For instance in the case of this telco issue, the people organized to put in their own fiber network (a public project is not necessarily a government project) and the government instead of promoting competition though fair trade stopped the people for building the product they wanted. In this case that is not a free market, that is a government regulated market hampering progress.
I think you missed the point. Yes military grade guidance systems that are accurate to with 1 meter and travel 500 miles are very advanced and a hobbyist couldn't build that from hobby store parts. However, if your goal is to indiscriminatingly kill people it is very easy to do with off the shelf components, if you are so inclined.
Another thing you are forgetting is that we built atomic bombs with minimal computing power. The first computers had trouble doing ballistic tables. Now you could make ballistics tables as an iPhone app. The level of information processing available to the public is staggering. There really isn't much that an individual so inclined couldn't produce.
Never has a subject line been so accurate... Look, it's pretty obvious that you have NEVER cooked anything. If you're cooking YOU'RE IN THE DAMNED KITCHEN! Why in hell would you want to access your kitchen appliances from a telephone or a videogame?
Look its pretty obvious that you've never cooked anything that has to sit in the oven or on the stove for longer than 20 min. You do the prep work, set the food in the oven, and then clean the mess. Then you go sit down at your x-box or ps3 and start playing a game. Next thing you know you totally forgot the timer and your food burned. Wouldn't it be nice if the oven timer notified you in game so you didn't burn your food. Or even paused the game automatically for you to go check the food.
I almost burned down the kitchen one time trying to make boiled p-nuts. I got engrossed in a game of Age of Empires and burned a hole in the bottom of the pan. Some kitchen automation is very useful.
Then there is the refrigerator. This is probably the most useful kitchen appliance to have on the network. You could scan bar codes of your condiments or even have webcams in the fridge to check and see what you have available. You could even store expiration dates of the food in the fridge and it could warn you when food expires. It could even suggest recipes for what you have available. So before you leave the office to go home you could look up what you need to pick up for supper that night.
Then there is slow cooking! You could set up a crock pot or dutch oven in the oven before you leave for work, then you could set it to start at some later time. Then you get held up in traffic and set the oven to warm instead of low, medium or high. Or even turn it up if you know you're going to be early.
I probably even agree with you that regulation is needed to avoid large boom and bust cycles at the cost of overall efficiency.
Before the Fed there were no "large" boom and bust cycles, there were much smaller "corrections" of the market. The Fed then started attempting to fix "corrections" which would allow the market to over inflate and then burst causing a larger correction than would naturally occur. The large boom bust cycles are a byproduct of market manipulation by the Fed.
I'm not in the abolish the fed camp or in the gold standard camp, but having the Fed maintain a fixed interest rate and a fixed money supply (i.e. no printing extra money) regardless of emergencies in the market would do wonders for the economy.
I see you've been drinking from the two-party cool-aid. The two party propaganda machine misdiagnosed the issues that caused the financial meltdown.
The market is unstable with natural rises and falls. The government through regulation tried to remove the falls without removing the rises. They put off the inevitable decline in the market through regulations and incentives; the entire time the market needed to correct itself with a downward trend, yet the FED through manipulation of interest rates and Congress through legislation increases home ownership kept building an unsustainable bubble. The market for the past 50 years has needed to have a major correction, but whenever the market tried to correct itself the FED or the Congress would step in. This time in order to keep the bubble inflated the Government directly intervened with two 750 billion dollar spending bills. Without the TARPS the market would have corrected itself and would be much more stable going forward. The dramatic decline in the market is a direct result of government intervention.
What we have done is traded a strong recession/market correction for long term inflation. The value of the dollar is in decline and will continue to decline until the US fixes its balance sheet. The Obama administration doesn't believe that a strong dollar is important, they are of the opinion that it will improve exports. However as the dollar weakens so does America's ability to get credit. Also as the dollar weakens it has the potential to loose its place as the de-facto currency for commodity exchanges (think oil). If/when another currency becomes the trading standard for oil, America's oil based economy will tank.
Slashdot Mirror
I haggle movie prices at Best Buy all the time. They usually give me a 20% discount. Mostly they are just matching internet prices for stuff like Naruto, but still I argue and they give me the discount.
Hypothetical.
I own a grain silo. The grain silo was expensive to build, but once built holds an infinite amount of grain. It does have a small cost to maintain.
Now I can sell the grain for $60 a bag. People really like my grain. But I have a near infinite supply and not everyone can afford the $60 bag. So I have people lined up around 6 Billion of them who would gladly buy a bag for $1. There are also people who couldn't even afford the dollar. Am I in the right to only sell my infinite supply of grain to people willing to pay $60?
Now a hyperbole: There are people starving. Withholding grain from people just because you want to make more money may be legal, but it doesn't make it right.
That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life! The kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage!
You're right about the dangerous pesticides.
You're wrong about dangerous dog breads.
As long as they obey leash laws the bread shouldn't matter. If you trespass into their fenced yard, and are bitten, that is your fault.
Reporting on the blowjob is just a red herring.
Better yet bring radium back to popular use. When Curie first discovered it they made makeup out of the stuff.
And this was the result.
I was with you till you started to ramble about the "death of conservative economics". What you fail to realize is that we don't live in a post-scarcity world. We live in a dual economy. We have parts of the economy that are post-scarcity and parts that are very scarce. Energy, technology, bits, are all post-scarcity. Water, food, land, Megan Fox are all scarce resources. The problem is that people are so used to the scarce economy that they don't know how to deal with the new post-scarce resources. They treat the post-scarce resources just like the scarce one and try to limit the distribution of those resources. To say that conservative economics is dead is a gross overstatement.
The Pokemon Episode you were looking for: Pokemon Episode 19
Its been done before...
The time traveling particle and the way it is described reminds me of the story of the tower of babble. Just saying...
... and high conductivity.
Why are we beaming power via laser when we are riding the lift up a conductive cable? Can't the cable itself transmit the electricity needed to power the elevator?
Not only that but a cable that long would generate enough electricity just by being there to propel the elevator without any external power. What am I missing?
This is what I mean! The touch screen isn't obvious and a lot of work goes into developing the first touch screen. However once a touch screen is developed all the different ways to use it become obvious. Someone can then patent a particular use of a touch screen barring other people from using it in that manner, which is total crap. The original invention required work to create, however it opens the door to millions of obvious uses once the original device has been created. These derivatives should not be patentable.
We already buy and sell votes. I don't think it would really matter if you could buy or sell a vote. If the issues matter in an election they couldn't pay you enough to change your vote. If the issues don't matter then why not sell your vote. You couldn't have paid me enough money to vote for Barack Obama (I voted Ron Paul - McCain is as bad or worse). As for city elections for something like school board, I'd so sell my vote because it really doesn't matter to me. But for any office where they have the option to tax or make something illegal you couldn't buy my vote (well in a way you do by your policies...) The entire system is based on buying and selling votes. You think that Barack's promises of health care for all weren't vote buying? Or not taxing anyone making less than $250,000 a year. That was so vote buying. A direct check from the candidate would be a much more efficient method.
The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.
- not Tocqueville or Tytler so we'll say unknown.
Why is it that a statistically insignificant number of people with a good sob story can change legislative policy?
Do we really need another law for that? I'm sorry, but I grew up at a time before seat belts when we used to put sleeping bags in the back of cars during long car trips and go to sleep in the back while mom and dad drove us to our destination. If you were to do that now the parents would be hauled off to jail for negligence.
I hate this one bad apple mentality. There are 310 million people and counting in the US; one persons daughter gets killed by a repeat offender and goes on a moral crusade and we now have 3 strike laws. You get busted for pot 3 times and you're in jail for 30 years. What kind of messed up society do we live in?
I'm sorry that you can see idiots using their cell phones so they become a scapegoat for all bad drivers. No matter what solution they come up with there will always be automobile accidents. They are part of life. It really sucks that a few thousand people can ruin it for millions of us.
What is the '78 Fiat Spiders better looking sister?
I guess its not so obvious, I pictured it more like a Nintendo DS with dual screens in a binder like setting. Whats the point of having two screens on the same page.... Two screens that open like a book, now that is an obvious use of multiple screens. Maybe I should patent it quick...
How does this not fall under the obvious clause? There are millions of these on shelves everywhere already.
You added one to many albums. Metallica (The Black Album), 1991 was the sell-out album that made them copyright whores. Before the black album they were tape sharing band like the Grateful Dead, after the black album they sold-out to the industry.
Label much?
Just because I think a Federal Education system is bad doesn't mean I don't think education should be provided for the masses. I just don't think it is something that should be provided by the Federal Government. There are other ways to provide education.
And way to fall victim to the indoctrination machine and believing that there are only two groups of political views: the left and the right. I'm sorry but there is a lot of stuff in the middle. The far right is messed up with their trying to shove religion down everyones throat and the far left is messed up trying to protect everyone from themselves.
By fixed money supply I was thinking one based on the Census. X number of dollars per person are printed annually, no more no less. Therefore the money supply is fixed to the population, not to the whims of the FED. The FED reserver rate would be fixed at something like 6-10%, high enough to discourage people from borrowing from the FED, but low enough that if you couldn't get a loan someplace else you had a "lender of last resort".
Wow you guys don't keep up with the news at all do you? Here is a story about homemade nuclear materials, good enough for a dirty bomb. With enough effort you could make something better.
And here is some homemade artillery. This stuff is easy to make.Ever heard of pumpkin chunking?
A rudementary level of blacksmithing or machine making can make some impressive guns.
I'm not under the impression that computers are the answer to everything, you still need to know what you are doing. The computer is only as good as those programming it.
Police are not babysitters. They are not there to protect us from ourselves. They are there to defend property and citizens from each other. For those reasons they are important.
If thugs go after some ethnic group that isn't yours you should not have to pay for their protection.
What does ethnicity have to do with anything? They are people too and would get the same protections of property and self as any other ethnicity.
If some indigent gets sick or insured you shouldn't have to pay for their care. Let them die if they don't have the money.
In a perfect and ideal world, no this would never happen. However ( and this is the point that everyone in the healthcare debate seems to miss ) It costs money to provide healthcare. In some cases lots of money. What is the value of human life? If a procedure is going to cost 100 million dollars to save 1 person is it still worth it because life is valuable? Death is inevitable, we are all going to die. It is just a matter of time. In some cases it is not worth it, even for a family member to pay the costs of healthcare. It is sometimes better to let your own child die then pay for a miracle. The idea that the government should pay whatever costs are necessary at the taxpayers expense is impractical. It doesn't mean we as a society shouldn't strive to provide care for all, it just means you must take into account the real costs in the real world and ask if it is worth it. Healthcare has costs it cannot and never will be free. Also, death is natural and it is not inhumane to let people die - no one lives forever.
On Education: For starters a public education system is the tenth plank of the communist manifesto. Second the public education system is used as an indoctrination tool and inhibits free thought, in the public education system you are punished for being a non-conformist. Then there is the cost of public education, once again people aren't practical about how to pay for it. Even if the first two points didn't matter the public education system is horribly underfunded to even meet its stated goals. Here are two more reasons why some people don't want to support public education: 1. They never used it (private or home schooled). 2. It holds back the bright students in order to cater to the failing ones.
I don't think anyone is for no-government. However we managed just fine for hundreds of years with less government. I'm all for government, just less of it. For instance in the case of this telco issue, the people organized to put in their own fiber network (a public project is not necessarily a government project) and the government instead of promoting competition though fair trade stopped the people for building the product they wanted. In this case that is not a free market, that is a government regulated market hampering progress.
I think you missed the point. Yes military grade guidance systems that are accurate to with 1 meter and travel 500 miles are very advanced and a hobbyist couldn't build that from hobby store parts. However, if your goal is to indiscriminatingly kill people it is very easy to do with off the shelf components, if you are so inclined.
Another thing you are forgetting is that we built atomic bombs with minimal computing power. The first computers had trouble doing ballistic tables. Now you could make ballistics tables as an iPhone app. The level of information processing available to the public is staggering. There really isn't much that an individual so inclined couldn't produce.
Never has a subject line been so accurate... Look, it's pretty obvious that you have NEVER cooked anything. If you're cooking YOU'RE IN THE DAMNED KITCHEN! Why in hell would you want to access your kitchen appliances from a telephone or a videogame?
Look its pretty obvious that you've never cooked anything that has to sit in the oven or on the stove for longer than 20 min. You do the prep work, set the food in the oven, and then clean the mess. Then you go sit down at your x-box or ps3 and start playing a game. Next thing you know you totally forgot the timer and your food burned. Wouldn't it be nice if the oven timer notified you in game so you didn't burn your food. Or even paused the game automatically for you to go check the food.
I almost burned down the kitchen one time trying to make boiled p-nuts. I got engrossed in a game of Age of Empires and burned a hole in the bottom of the pan. Some kitchen automation is very useful.
Then there is the refrigerator. This is probably the most useful kitchen appliance to have on the network. You could scan bar codes of your condiments or even have webcams in the fridge to check and see what you have available. You could even store expiration dates of the food in the fridge and it could warn you when food expires. It could even suggest recipes for what you have available. So before you leave the office to go home you could look up what you need to pick up for supper that night.
Then there is slow cooking! You could set up a crock pot or dutch oven in the oven before you leave for work, then you could set it to start at some later time. Then you get held up in traffic and set the oven to warm instead of low, medium or high. Or even turn it up if you know you're going to be early.
Just saying, kitchen automation isn't useless.
I probably even agree with you that regulation is needed to avoid large boom and bust cycles at the cost of overall efficiency.
Before the Fed there were no "large" boom and bust cycles, there were much smaller "corrections" of the market. The Fed then started attempting to fix "corrections" which would allow the market to over inflate and then burst causing a larger correction than would naturally occur. The large boom bust cycles are a byproduct of market manipulation by the Fed.
I'm not in the abolish the fed camp or in the gold standard camp, but having the Fed maintain a fixed interest rate and a fixed money supply (i.e. no printing extra money) regardless of emergencies in the market would do wonders for the economy.
I see you've been drinking from the two-party cool-aid. The two party propaganda machine misdiagnosed the issues that caused the financial meltdown.
The market is unstable with natural rises and falls. The government through regulation tried to remove the falls without removing the rises. They put off the inevitable decline in the market through regulations and incentives; the entire time the market needed to correct itself with a downward trend, yet the FED through manipulation of interest rates and Congress through legislation increases home ownership kept building an unsustainable bubble. The market for the past 50 years has needed to have a major correction, but whenever the market tried to correct itself the FED or the Congress would step in. This time in order to keep the bubble inflated the Government directly intervened with two 750 billion dollar spending bills. Without the TARPS the market would have corrected itself and would be much more stable going forward. The dramatic decline in the market is a direct result of government intervention.
What we have done is traded a strong recession/market correction for long term inflation. The value of the dollar is in decline and will continue to decline until the US fixes its balance sheet. The Obama administration doesn't believe that a strong dollar is important, they are of the opinion that it will improve exports. However as the dollar weakens so does America's ability to get credit. Also as the dollar weakens it has the potential to loose its place as the de-facto currency for commodity exchanges (think oil). If/when another currency becomes the trading standard for oil, America's oil based economy will tank.